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January 3Store upgradeHi Everyone, I've dusted off my PHP hat and built an automatic activation key generator for the website so that purchases and trial registrations can be processed on-line immediately. [Previously the key generator was manually operated and off-line only.] The new key generator is running now in the trial registration page, and in the next few days it will be switched on for the PayPal 'pay now' buttons in the store. The Kagi payment option, which is used for non-PayPal payments (i.e. credit cards, wire transfer, etc.), will be wired in sometime thereafter, once I've got my head around the particulars of their system. Cheerio, Aaron. November 30L3DT release 11.11 is availableHi All, L3DT release 11.11 is now available for download in all three flavours (Standard, Professional, and Pro for Torque.) Please read on for a description of the changes.
Speed, glorious speed!This release includes some massive performance optimisations, which increases the speed of some calculations by as much as 4 times. These optimisations include multi-threading of the attributes map calculation, improved RAM usage, and optimisation of the colour map interpolation routines. The nature of these optimisations were described in September, so I shan't bore you with reiteration. Bug fixesA number of bugs were fixed in this release, including:
Other bug fixes and changes are listed in the change log. How to downloadAs with all L3DT updates, this is a free update for all users of L3DT Standard Edition, as well as all users of L3DT Professional and L3DT Pro for Torque who have purchased a license within the past 18 months. If the 18 month 'free update' period for your license has expired (see the 'Help→About' box), you will need to renew your license to be able to use this update (contact sales@bundysoft.com to discuss discounts). To download the update, please follow the instructions below:
FeedbackPlease let me know what you think of the new release. Comments, requests and bug reports are all welcome, as well as suggestions for the next release. Please feel free to make use of this forum thread. End transmissionBest regards, Aaron. October 18L3DT 11.10 beta 1 is available!Hi Everyone, A beta release of the next version of L3DT Professional is now available for download, as v11.10 beta 1. The most noteworthy changes in this release are the enormous speed improvements achieved by optimising memory usage, improving linear interpolation, and by multi-threading the attributes map generation (see post). All up, these changes have increased the speed of some map calculations by as much as 3-4 times. This update also includes a fix for the optimised mesh exporter to allow it to fully optimise the edges of un-tiled maps (see post). Various other bug fixes are also included. Please let me know if you find any problems with this beta release. Best regards, Aaron. September 8Optimisations ahoy!Hi All, A new developmental build of L3DT Professional is now available on the downloads page (L3DT v11.09 build 2, dated 6th of Sept). This build includes as a number of performance optimisations and a couple of bug fixes. The changes are described below: More RAM, more speedL3DT 11.09 now uses more RAM to cache map tiles so as to improve the speed of calculations on large maps. This new scheme allows L3DT to grow its cache size until 80% of the system RAM is consumed. If other programs need more memory, L3DT will 'play nice' by dumping its extra cache and releasing the memory back to the operating system. All this is done seamlessly, and you’ll never notice it happening1). The performance boost from this change is most evident with large maps (>4k x 4k pixels) for calculations that reparse the maps several times. For instance, a 3x speed-up was observed for water table flooding on a 8192×4096 pixel map. Further improvements to calculation speed have been achieved by ending the previous practice of automatically purging mosaic maps to disk between calculation stages. This was unnecessary and slow. Multithreaded attributes map calculationThe attributes map calculation is now multi-threaded, and was clocked at running ~3.6x faster when using four cores compared to a single core. When compared to the previous release (11.08), the new build was observed to be more than 4 times faster at generating an attributes maps. Optimised texture and normal vector interpolationMore modest speed improvements have been achieved by optimising the linear interpolation routines for RGB images and normal maps. The normal map generation calculation now runs about 20% faster, and the texture map calculation runs up to 80% faster when generating a high-resolution texture maps without anti-aliasing2). Mesh exporter bugsThe mesh exporter included with L2DT 11.08 had a couple of issues that have been fixed in this build.
Please note that the exporter currently leaves the edges of tiled mesh files fully unoptimised. This will be addressed in a future release, after much thinkering and development. Display problemsSome users are still experiencing graphical display problems in Windows 7, even when using the latest drivers. This was previously fixed in L3DT 2.9 by disabling the smooth halftone blending in the 2D display window, but this had the undesirable effect of making the maps appear more pixellated. In version 11.09, halftone blending is on by default, but it may be disabled by selecting the 'Settings→Local settings' menu option, and double-clicking on the 'View→HalftoneFlag' option to set the value to false. Alternatively, you can disable halftone blending by downloading this patch file and dropping it on the L3DT 11.09 desktop icon. To re-enable halftone blending, use this patch file.
Because patch files are text, your browser may display their contents rather than download the files. To download the files, right-click on the text file contents, select the 'save page' option, and give the file a filename that ends with '.patch.txt'.
If you still experience display glitches with halftone blending disabled, please let me know. You can post your bug reports in the forum, or by e-mail (aaron@bundysoft.com.) Bug fixesThere are also a few other miscellaneous bug fixes, including:
That's allCheers, Aaron. Except where otherwise noted, content on this wiki is licensed under the following license:CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
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